chronologies” in Wuthering Heights, which Emily Brontë “mixes” in order to depict the conflict between the novel’s “temporal progressions” and its “timelessness”, probably alluding to Miyoshi’s above-mentioned chronology, which Knoepflmacher published. In his own publication, Miyoshi detects two “time-schemes” in Wuthering Heights, the “straight chronological” and “ordinary time” of Mr. Lockwood and the “mythical time” of the “Heathcliff-Cathy generation”, coming to the conclusion that “[a];t the end of the story myth is swallowed up in time” (1969, p. 217). Alison Booth is clearly referring to this when she deems the chronology to be “[a]t once mythic and calendrically precise” (2009, p. xxx). Heywood (2004, p. 433) also mentions two such timelines, which he calls the “1778 and 1779 series (numerical series)”, without citing the studies by Knoepflmacher or Miyoshi. Heywood is not able to resolve the discrepancy of the timelines. He is so convinced that 1801, the starting point of his “1779 series”, dates the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit to Wuthering Heights that he even considers that Hareton Earnshaw could in fact have been born in 1779, rather than in 1778, even though 1778 is the only absolute year named by Ellen Dean and refers unambiguously to Hareton’s birth. Conal Boyce (2013) reflects on Catherine Earnshaw’s date of birth and draws six chronological conclusions. Otherwise he adopts, but only in part, Sanger’s chronology and the “traditional dates” derived from it, considering the dates to be “generally accepted nowadays uncritically” (2013, pp. 100, 101). What is more, he admits that his revision could be “myopic” and “simply erroneous”.
Hardly a treatise exists on Wuthering Heights that does not assert that the plot of the novel is told in an unchronological fashion by Ellen Dean and Mr. Lockwood. Gerda Stedman (2015, pp. 80–83) even employs the semantically rather unclear term “achronological”, though it is debatable whether this means here that the chronological order of events is not adhered to or that the novel does not have a (rigorous) chronology. H. W. Garrod (1930, p. xii) remarks that Wuthering Heights, according to some, is “careless in its indications of date”. Again and again, Ellen Dean is accused of not always being accurate in her chronology; of being an unreliable, untrustworthy narrator just like Mr. Lockwood.7 W. Somerset Maugham counts Wuthering Heights amongst the ten greatest ←16 | 17→novels in world literature and pays Emily Brontë unparalleled compliments, but at the same time he considers the novel “very clumsily constructed […] very imperfect” (1948, pp. 130, 132, 133). Unsurprisingly, he was severely rebuked (cf. Weir, p. 414). Robert Gleckner (1959, p. 330) is of the opinion that the novel does not report so much “an orderly progression in chronological time of separated, discontinuous events” but that the narrative structure conveys “a kind of all-pervading present, of which the past and the future are integral parts”, with past episodes appearing like flashbacks. Walter Kluge (1972, p. 1238) claims that the novel is not chronological, not “linear”. Carol Louise West (1981, pp. i–ii) also believes there to be “nonlinear representations of time” in Wuthering Heights, and that monthly “cyclical recurrences” represent the “ordering principle” of the novel, by which she probably means the plot. She considers the studies by Sanger and his successors to be “very technical” (which Sanger presciently feared, and which could explain their wide acceptance, though seemingly paradoxically at first), and the philosophically-oriented studies on temporality to be “very general”.8 West supposes that Emily Brontë is concerned with more than just “conventional distinctions between past, present, and future” (ibid., p. iv).
Despite this unsatisfactory state of affairs, this “chronological muddle”, the old chronologies with their “traditional dates” (Boyce, p. 100) have been, and continue to be, cited in literature on Wuthering Heights and used as a basis for textual interpretation. The dating is clearly regarded as accepted or tolerated, be it out of ignorance or because there is nothing better. In this respect, one can speak of a general consensus on the internal chronology of Wuthering Heights. The years 1801 and 1802 at the beginning of Chapters 1 and 32 respectively have never been scrutinised as to whether they are in fact chronologically relevant for the dating of the events in the novel, that is whether there is another explanation for the dates. Whether Wuthering Heights has a consistent and transparent chronological order and why Emily Brontë made a great mystery out of her time scheme – if there is one – continue to puzzle. Is Wuthering Heights a cryptic representation of reality in the spirit of E. Auerbach? Why did Emily Brontë hide her watch, as E. M. Forster (1927, p. 31) puts it in a witty but not entirely apposite metaphor (for what is really missing is a calendar, a rigorous timetable)? Why did Emily Brontë behave like a “Sibylline”, as Chitham phrases it? Why is “the whole texture [of Wuthering Heights] dense, posing questions and ←17 | 18→giving half-answers” (Chitham, pp. 5, 6)? Chitham (1998, p. 88) assumes that as a “nervous and retiring perfectionist, she would have been delighted to hear that thousands of readers 150 years after her death would still be enjoying her novel, but would have been reluctant to clarify what they found puzzling”. That may be so, but she would certainly not have been delighted by the accusation of defects in her craft. This study aims to solve this dilemma and put an end to dismissive criticism in Wuthering Heights-literature. It will be shown that the chronologically relevant fictional facts can be treated like real facts, i.e. the facts can be objectively quantified and determined as they are in the natural sciences.9 In such a way, mathematical rigor can be used to counteract the inherent stubbornness of scholarship with its need for harmony in the formation of facts, even if they are delusions (to draw upon the words of L. Fleck from his sociological and scientific theoretical study on the genesis and development of a scientific fact first published in 1935 (Fleck 1979)).
To this end, the next chapter will start by establishing the time structures of the novel. The three named absolute years already mentioned – the year 1778 (the year of Hareton Earnshaw’s birth, in Chapters 7 and 8), the year 1801 (at the beginning of Chapter 1) and the year 1802 (at the beginning of Chapter 32) – are taken as the basis. The assumption is that these named years are correct unless they are refuted by other data. As will be seen, all other relative time references can be mapped to these three named absolute years.10 It is crucial for the coherence of the time references and for the reconstruction of the chronology to determine what happened in a particular year. The result will depend ←18 | 19→on whether 1801 is considered to be the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit (which has always been assumed and which the text seems to suggest) or whether 1801 is seen as referring to something else, namely the beginning of Mr. Lockwood’s diary-like records.
The past events of Mr. Lockwood’s diary, therefore, must not only be brought into a coherent chronological order, they must also correlate with his reporting present, which he here and there weaves into his discourse. In other words, it must be kept in mind that some of Mr. Lockwood’s remarks may relate to the reporting present rather than to the reported past. This applies a fortiori to what Ellen Dean tells him in several sittings and what he notes down in portions some time later.
Chapter II goes on to discuss the various ways and means of deducing a chronology of the events from the data provided. After a brief overview of the novel’s narrative structure and narrators, as well as the dating methodology used, time schemes are determined from the data provided by Mr. Lockwood and Ellen Dean, and an analysis of the proposals found in Wuthering Heights-literature is provided. Starting with the premise that 1801 refers to the year that Mr. Lockwood writes his diary, rather than to the year of his first visit to Wuthering Heights, it becomes apparent that many time references can be squared with one another, above all the references which concern the central events of the novel. However, there are a few references that do not appear to fit. These are discussed in detail to demonstrate that they cannot be attributed to errors made by the author and to show that they make sense within the novel. These data, which at first glance seem incorrect, can be explained intra-fictionally, fitting into the framework of an overarching interpretation, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter VII. Before this, Chapter III presents
